That was the entire point of my Sci Fi techothriller I never finished writing where the plot was the HST was a declassified KH-11 and to F the Soviets over we released the declassified HST with an intentional fault so the Soviet clone would be faulty. Its a win-win because the service mission to fix the HST made the right people on our side extra money, but the Soviets didn't have a working-enough space-truck to fix their clones of the HST/KH-11, and we were certainly not going to volunteer to fix their KH-11 clone for them LOL.
It was never going to be a good book plot so I gave up on it. Unrealistic that they'd steal "everything" including the intentional mistake. The idea of a double agent plot where "their guy" was actually "our guy" who made sure they stole the entire lot including the intentional grinding error was, um, cringy. In defense of my bad novel plot, I was young at the time, and I've read worse books.
I always thought that Hubble in fact was a declassified KH-11. And indeed the NRO declassified and donated a couple more obsolete Keyholes to NASA in 2012 [1], one of which is now being used as the chassis (and optics?) of the NGRST [2].
Well, it wasn’t. This is pretty well documented. It has pretty much the same design requirements and even some of the same contractors, but it also differed in key ways. It had a totally different instrumentation board, optical packages, and was built for servicing which KH wasn’t.
The fact that it was the same form factor is not an accident, as Hubble was sized to fit in the shuttle payload bay, which was itself sized based on keyhole.
It was never going to be a good book plot so I gave up on it. Unrealistic that they'd steal "everything" including the intentional mistake. The idea of a double agent plot where "their guy" was actually "our guy" who made sure they stole the entire lot including the intentional grinding error was, um, cringy. In defense of my bad novel plot, I was young at the time, and I've read worse books.